Launching the Horsemen
by Zaedah
Summary: Disappointment is the star of the common man.


_Written and presented in response to the news that mankind is scheduled to end today (according to Harold Camping). For this auspicious event, I've broken out pre-series Tony for your pleasure. _

_This also marks my 200th story on FFnet. Shocking, I know._

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><p><strong>Launching the Horsemen<strong>

**The world ends on Saturday.**

At least that's the expectation of the filthy fugitive in the holding cell. Citing a scheduling conflict, Detective DiNozzo leaves the homeless man to his footnoted sermon. It's worse when they speak clearly. Makes the listener question, somewhere in the deeper parts that doubt hasn't shredded, makes one consider... what if? What if this week's struggle and last week's worries and last lifetime's sins conclude with a holy reckoning on a designated party night? Only a malicious god would come to collect when Tony's got a date with a just-legal blond and an aged bottle of something red.

One should be sober before explaining the finer points of debauchery.

Of course, it would present an easy excuse for nixing any last-minute stakeout assignment tonight; _Sorry boys, Armageddon's coming. Must pack._

Which implies that he actually owns things.

With the ink on his detective pedigree barely dry, DiNozzo's got a new desk, a meager thing that must have seen the bombing of London firsthand. Day one taught him not to leave anything in the drawers that doesn't long for redistribution. Day two is instructing him on the insightful properties of imitation wood grain when one seeks a distraction from paperwork. The warped surface, with tattoos of interlocking scratches descending into caverns of gouges, is a reflection of his current living arrangement; sparse, uncluttered, damaged yet inarguably functional. It's a declaration of low-rung status, on both the cop pay scale and the promotional totem pole.

They say he has arrived. The destination varies little from the journey's scenery. He feels like the child who watches out the car window as the distant fair looms in grandeur and discovers that the fairground is replete with dismantled toddler rides. In these parts, they believe that disappointment is the star of the common man.

He tells people he grew up poor and in the existential, it's nearly true.

Which is why it bothers Tony, while his paperwork is being completed in a supernatural rush, to hear a father blaming his own criminal mischief on his teenaged son. The kid looks terrified, of the officer, of his dad, of the general grime of the station that won't come off as easily as the fingerprint ink. The family that's booked together stays together. Monday they'll have a hearing. Not that it matters.

**Because the world ends on Saturday.**

Precinct walls aren't thick enough.

Floating above the dad's frantic, slightly inebriated pleading, the hobo is still calmly lecturing the collection of hallway loiterers on the impending wrath, resplendent with fiery demons running ramshackle over suburbia. Someone's heckling, probably a sergeant. Tonight's demons are featured heavily in cells five through eight but this town has shown Tony that the worst evil spirits drip coffee on their badges.

They say Baltimore's nice this time of year...

The prophet is still spouting apocalyptic predictions, complete with timed Horsemen launch, when DiNozzo wraps up the more meaningless functions of the night. A pretty marketing major is waiting and unless she can sell the world on last minute airfare to the relative safety of purgatory, she's not likely to care about the sageness of a vagrant's cause.

Her soul won't be on his agenda tonight.

The thing is, Tony doesn't spend much time wrestling with the great beyond, which might account for acid rain. That would be his Italian grandmother spitting down curses for not taking Catholicism seriously. He's all for God, moans out the title rather fervently most nights. But he's had enough judgment to last several reincarnations.

Questionable deeds are a direct result of the genetics God had seen fit to bestow. What else did the Almighty expect him to do with the gift? It's almost a responsibility to use his personal resources. To make her laugh, to make her curious, to make her fall. Even if it's only for one night. He never thinks beyond the opening round, leaves the long-term strategizing to men with time. Like those unaware that all existence will cease as the sun acts as a time-release capsule, killing the population incrementally as it coasts across the boiling sky. _Note to self: double the effort to score tonight._

**Since the world ends on Saturday.**

But there's still two hours to go on this promising Friday night and he doesn't mean to waste them on piety.


End file.
